I’ve been working on a post on the trigram kun, earth, as inner trigram. That one will come soon – this is just something I wondered about along the way.
I started going through the sequence of hexagrams, looking at the Image texts for the ones with earth inside…
‘Above earth is the stream. Seeking Union.
The ancient kings founded countless cities for relationships with all the feudal lords.’‘Thunder bursts forth from the earth. Enthusiasm
The ancient kings composed music to honour virtue,
They celebrated and worshipped the supreme lord,
Joining with their ancestors.’‘Wind moves over the earth. Seeing.
The ancient kings studied the regions,
Saw the people,
And established their teachings.’
I’d got about this far when I was distracted by the ancient kings: there seemed to be a great many of them about. Was this a pattern, or a coincidence?
Well… there are seven hexagrams that mention the ancient kings in their Image text: 8, 16, 20, 21, 24, 25 and 59. Of these, three have kun as their inner trigram, and then there’s also 24 with kun as outer trigram. If the distribution were random, I don’t think you’d expect to see it more than a couple of times overall, and once as inner trigram.
So are the ancient kings especially like earth? Mothers to their people?
Perhaps. But this is only half the picture: the trigram zhen, thunder, also appears three times as inner trigram and once as outer trigram in ‘their’ hexagrams. The ancient kings are also innovators, the inner impulse that set civilisation in motion.
The arrangement of earth and thunder through these seven hexagrams is oddly symmetrical, look:
Here they all are, ignoring the actual distances between them in the sequence. (What is Hexagram 59 doing out there on a limb?)
And here’s the character wang, king:
王
It’s been written much like this since early times: three horizontal strokes joined by a single vertical one through the centre.
(Not for the first time, I feel as though I’m catching on v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y…)
Beautiful!
We all catch on very slowly, because there is so very much to catch on. The I Ching is a deep dark mystery, as is the Tao. We can’t possibly begin to understand it. Has anybody ever read a book multiple times, and the most recent time a certain phrase or sentence suddenly means something very deep to you that you never recognized before? You didn’t recolonize it before because your mind wasn’t ready. When the student is ready, the master approaches. The inner master.
We think than when we hit twenty, or forty, or sixty, we are mature. Nothing could be further from the truth. When we hit 20,000 lifetimes, maybe we can consider ourselves mature, maybe. The I Ching is a deep well, (48), and none can find the bottom of the well. The subject encroached upon here is a deep subject. Apparently, even kings have to mature, and when the king is finally mature, he dissipates, as in hexagram 59, no longer bound to the earthly realm.
I posted a reply, but it seems to have disappeared. Hmmm
I posted twice, and both times the post disappeared.
Okay, now I see the posts
And note, hexagram 59 is so far away from the others. Many lessons have been learned, so the king here approaches his/her temple, perhaps never to leave again, being so far beyond the others in temperament and maturity.